On February 27, 1994, three Costa Rican engineers took an afternoon flight from San José to Managua, Nicaragua. The timing for this trip was good in more ways than one. Little by little, more than a decade of war in the region was coming to an end. The trip had a single purpose: participate in Nicaragua’s connection to the Internet. In Managua, a group of collaborators who had worked for months to establish this link awaited them. For almost three years, they had been making plans together for Nicaragua’s Internet connection through Costa Rica via an analog microwave link built in the late 60s, a decade in which the concept of Central American integration had flourished. From Costa Rica, Nicaragua would be connected to Homestead, Florida through a satellite antenna. This goal was achieved the very next day and was celebrated enthusiastically. A public event was held at the Nicaraguan university that led this initiative. After a series of training and work sessions with their Nicaraguan counterparts, the Costa Rican engineers returned to San José on March 2. Only four months later, they would repeat this process in a different setting: the new site was Panama, but the purpose and procedures were almost identical.
This story has captivated me since I first heard it a few years ago for various reasons. First, because of its historical importance. Between 1993 and 1996, Central American countries established direct links to the Internet for the first time in history. Moreover, the Internet connection of one country through the infrastructure of another was a technological milestone in Latin America. Second, it reflects the creativity of a group of people from countries with few economic resources, in a region devastated by years of war and crisis. Peace agreements negotiated at the end of the 1980s required lengthy processes of economic, political, and social reconstruction over the following decade (Pérez Brignoli, 2010). In most countries of the region, peace was only attained well into the 1990s. Thus, because of the historical context in which this occurred, connecting to the Internet was a political as much as a technological achievement. Third, the significance of the story also involves the actors in question: the network linked two neighboring countries with a complicated historical relationship marked by chronic controversies. Finally, this achievement matters for how it symbolizes a specific era in the history of computer networks in the southern hemisphere. Various actors in Latin America experienced similar processes in some way or another. Establishing new nodes of computer networks required these kinds of exchanges and flows, these twists and turns.
How and why did Central America connect to the Internet? What consequences did the link to early computer networks have in the region? This book sets out to answer these two research questions through an original analysis of the projects that resulted in the first Internet connections in countries of the region. These projects were characterized by the establishment of not only technological networks but also transnational collaborations between actors and organizations. In this way, Central American countries connected to and through computer networks such as the Internet. Drawing on archival work and interviews with the protagonists of these projects (including directors and collaborators of the networking projects, figures in politics, government and international organizations, representatives of telecommunications companies, and pioneer users, among others), this book examines how initiatives to connect to early computer networks unfolded and were developed from the mid-1980s to the end of the 1990s.
The following pages discuss the early development of the Internet in a region that has not received much academic attention. Consistent with the tendency to provide “hagiographic” descriptions of successful cases (Russell, 2017), historical research has primarily dealt with the most connected countries. As a result, we know little of how the Internet has been historically envisioned and implemented in less connected regions, such as Central America. Therefore, our understanding of the early development of computer networks in the global south is limited. Over the past few years, there has been a growing interest in studying the use and development of media technologies in Latin America (Chan, 2014; Kleine, 2013; Medina, 2011; Penix-Tadsen, 2016; Takhteyev, 2012). Together, these monographs seek to “move the story of invention and innovation southward; study forms of local innovation and use; analyze the circulation of ideas, people, and artifacts in local and global networks; and investigate the creation of hybrid technologies and forms of knowledge production” (Medina, da Costa Marques, & Holmes, 2014, p. 3). However, these studies tend to focus on some of the largest countries in the southern continent. This book suggests that, because of its history and political, economic, and social configurations, the study of Central America can also offer important analytic lessons for interdisciplinary research on the development of media technologies, including research conducted in and about Latin America.
The possibility of establishing communication networks through technology has raised hopes throughout history. Mattelart (2000) traces this process back to at least the eighteenth century, when the network became “the emblematic figure of the new organization of society” (p. 15). Few concepts have marked the turn of the century more than the “network” (Boltanski & Chiapello, 1999; Castells, 1996). In a recent interview, Guy de Téramond, one of the architects and protagonists of the story of how Costa Rica and Nicaragua came to be interconnected, which this book starts with, offered a terse but profound explanation of the motivations that characterized these types of projects: “Such is the nature of networks” (Siles, 2017a, p. 352). There are several ways to interpret this assertion. Seen strictly as a computational phenomenon, de Téramond suggests that networks require new nodes in order to acquire or enhance their value. A more radical vision would attribute networks with a natural potential for expansion. Taken together, these interpretations capture a common understanding of the capacity that was ascribed to the Internet at the dawn of Central America’s interconnection: networks have an intrinsic capacity to enhance integration and collaboration. In other words, integration would be a natural result of the construction of networks. This book transforms this assumption into an empirical question.
To that end, I propose to adapt actor-network theory’s classic tenet (“follow the actors”). Actor-network theory considers every “fact” as a network composed of human and non-human actors that assume identities through a multiplicity of negotiations and interaction strategies. “Following the actors” thus means “[catching] up with [actors’] often wild innovations in order to learn from them what collective existence has become in their hands […] which accounts could best define the new associations that they have been forced to establish” (Latour, 2005, p. 12). Over the following pages, I show that the study of computer networks also requires “following the networks.” First, this means tracking the processes through which computer networks arrived in Central America in the mid-1980s. Second, this tenet invites us to understand how different nodes emerged in different parts of the Central American region; how flows of exchanges between these nodes were established; and through which actors, logic, and contexts these exchanges became possible. This is, in essence, an exercise in transnational analysis. That is the task set out for this book.
Comparative work about Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua has been frequent in academic research. However, deciding what counts as part of the “Central American region” is an exercise fraught with tensions. In this project, Panama was included in the analysis in addition to the five other countries, due to both its participation in the processes analyzed as well as to its historical connections with the processes described in the present work. For that reason, whenever Central America is mentioned, I refer to the aforementioned nations (i.e. América Central), despite the clear links of the study with the strictly delimitated geographic region’s history (i.e. Centroamérica). In contrast, Belize was excluded from the investigation. Although it could be argued that geographically it is part of this region, and that there was some collaboration between the actors discussed in this book and their counterparts in Belize, their networking processes were somewhat different compared to the other cases examined here.
Networks, Integration and Development: Theoretical and Methodological Considerations
By examining the early process of the connection to computer networks in Central America, this book dialogues with different interdisciplinary fields of knowledge in order to develop three theoretical arguments. These arguments span technology research, integration processes, and perspectives on development.
A Transnational History of the Internet
First, I argue that transnational flows of knowledge, data, and technologies are not only an inherent feature of the Internet, but rather a constitutive characteristic of its historical development. This is crucial to understand the histories of the Internet, but it has been seldom recognized in scholarly literature. Most historical research has focused on the study of the Internet mainly through national accounts (Brügger & Milligan, 2018; Goggin & McLelland, 2017). Transnational, regional networking efforts have received significantly less academic attention. This book makes visible the importance of transnational processes in the history of the Internet.
The study of transnational histories gained traction at the turn of the century, in the context of marked academic concerns about processes such as globalization. Transnational history is more an “umbrella” term than a field with established conceptual boundaries. As such, it tends to be defined more as an approach, “a way of seeing” things (Be...